Poppy’s strange records improvement

CONTROVERSY continues to surround the Home Office’s plan to subject clients of sex workers to £1,000 fines if the women they arrange sex with subsequently turn out to have been coerced, though the nonsensical “controlled for gain” phrase has been dropped in favour of women who have been “subjected to force, deception or threats” including those “subjected to force by psychological means and the exploitation of vulnerability.”

This followed heated exchanges in the Commons Scrutiny Commitee on the legislation – the Policing and Crime Bill – where MPs queried the fates of many trafficking victims and whether they would continue to be rescued by punters given the prospect of £1,000 fines and resulting publicity.

Among those giving evidence at the Committee was Denise Marshall, chief executive of the Poppy Project, which provides homes and support for rescued trafficking victims, mainly in London. Suddenly at the Committee, she made an astonishing assertion:

Interestingly, in the time we have run the POPPY project, we have had 22 referrals from punters—from those buying sex from trafficked women.

They made the referrals because the women were in an obvious physical and emotional state of distress. That sounds good on the surface until you realise that all the 22 men had sex with the trafficked woman before they phoned us.

These are trafficked women whom we have taken into our projects and whom have given evidence to us in statements. All those men, knowing the women were trafficked, had sex before phoning us to help the women to get out of their situation.

This clearly had a stunning effect on the committee, and was duly quoted by Home Office minister Alan Campbell to Parliament at the Report Stage. Yet the more one thinks about this, the less astonishing it becomes, and the more one studies the subject, the more one has reason to question Ms Marshall’s assertion.

Whereas in society in general, a relationship precedes sex, in a brothel the process is reversed. Sex comes first and a relationship, if it happens at all, develops afterwards. That is what brothels are for: it is their very raison d’être. So we should be less than surprised that the men had had sex with the women at an early stage in the proceedings.

A trafficked woman, furthermore, is unlikely to divulge her story to every punter who comes along. In doing so, she risks the punter taking the matter up with the brothel management and the possibility of reprisals. Imparting her plight to a punter therefore entails a degee of risk and consequently requires the build-up of trust.

Furthermore, many trafficked women have little or no English. This story tells the tale of one woman’s remarkable escape and the lengths that a punter had to go to in order to overcome the language barrier.

And from the punter’s perspective, the conclusion that a woman may be a trafficking victim is not necessarily reached quickly. It may gradually dawn. Furthermore, once the conclusion is reached, aiding the victim’s escape may be a dangerous enterprise and may require at least some degree of co-planning, perhaps with repeat visits to the brothel.

But why would a punter get involved in the escape himself, rather than tip-off the police or Crimestoppers and spark a raid? Some undoubtedly do spark raids, but there can be many reasons not to – the possible prosecutions of low level managers, the loss of the establishment, possibly the enforced deporation of some of the other sex workers. In addition to this, the relationship with the victim may by now have become important to him, and this also could be threatened.

More questions could be asked of Ms Marshall’s assertion, however, once one has read through her Poppy Project’s publication Routes In, Routes Out, produced less than six months before her statement to the Committee.

This document was “collated from the case files of 118 women supported by the POPPY Project (on either an acute or outreach basis) long enough to have developed a trusting relationship with their Senior Support Worker between March 2003 and July 2007.”

Paragraph 5.4 on Page 20 gives a breakdown of how the 118 women escaped their captors. Only nine, it states, were known to have escaped with the help of punters.

However, Poppy had no record of how some 25 of these women escaped, whilst a further score or so escaped as a result of police raids which may or may not have been sparked off by punters’ tip-offs.

The other point is that no well-infomed punter is likely to refer a trafficking victim to Poppy – a notoriously anti-punter institution – given alternative organisations who provide support such as the Salvation Army.

It becomes clear, then, that out of the best documented of their 118 referals just last August, Poppy had no idea how more than a fifth of them had escaped their captors, and no apparent knowledge of how many of the police raids were sparked by punters.

Given the departure of most of the women back to their home countries many months ago, it seems extraordinary that Denise Marshall could tell the Scrutiny Committee so definitively not only that Poppy has received 22 referrals from punters, but that in each and every case the men had had sex with the victims after knowing they were trafficked.

the poppy project likes to portray itself as some kind of angelic and pious organisation,
in truth its real aim is to persecute sex workers,especially female sex workers who don’t fit with its political ideology of what women should be doing with their lives.
the financial incentive is provided by the labour govt in the form of taxpayer funded donations(wage bill for 2008-9 was £529,403)

The one thing that feminist fundamentalist organisations and religious organisations have in common is their sheer hatred for sexual freedom including prostitution. The feminist fundamentalist groups which includes all types of feminists that are against one sexual freedom or all sexual freedoms (who of course hijacked the term and meaning feminist from sane moderate and liberal feminists that loves sexual freedom and supports prostitution) are nothing more then sexist women supremacists that wants to treat men like how men treated women over the centuries (though you can thank religion for that since most religions repress women).
The religious ones that are mostly ran by religious groups that are against sexual freedom (even though you get religious people who support prostitution and other sexual freedoms but those are only a minority unfortunately) especially the Salvation Army, they only help people in bad situations by converting them in the process making it look like that the only way that people who were forced into the sex industry and people who have whatever problems etc that the only way out of it will be to convert to whatever religion it is. Those religious groups don’t care about these people deep down, they only want to increase the number of followers and supporters and will do anything to make it happen even if they have to cause the problems themselves and make up statistics.
I guess is really shows that people who are pro-prostitution and pro-sexual freedom have two groups of opposer’s or enemies which have different types but have similar views or agendas as the others and are willing to make up statistics, facts and even make/cause the actual problems themselves. Shows how desperate they are and it is hard to believe that those tactics have worked in Sweden, Norway and Iceland.

Madam Becky
‘Madam Becky Adams. 20 years in the British Sex industry, a witty, comedy blog about lust, love & sex by the UK’s most famous Madam’

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I am a middle-aged man living in South London. Why have I called myself Bête de Nuit? It is the opposite of Belle de Jour. She has written of her work as an escort, at the other end of the spectrum from the drug addicted homeless girls that I have met. B